Having sampled it once, when I was way, way off the clock, I have come to research the enterprise from the ground up.

Tautznik still makes his home in his boyhood house, living in the shadow of Mount Tom on a road that was made of dirt when his parents built the homestead in 1947.

His older brother John lives across the street. Some cousins used to live next door. At one time it was all farms hereabouts, and on a high summer day you can still stand in the lush green grass and think you’re in rural Vermont.

Tautznik is barefoot despite a summer cold, and ostensibly protected by his dog Scruffy, who comes limping out of the shade with tail a-wag. Scruffy, he explains, was abandoned on an Easthampton street some 10 years ago and became an early member of the Tautznik administration, now in its 14th year.

Tautznik is the only mayor Easthampton has had since a 1996 charter change created the office, though his municipal career harks back to 1977 and his seat on the Conservation Commission.

Today, Tautznik and brother John are doing site work for a new barn to replace the one which their parents built and was recently taken down. Although they don’t claim the title “farmers,” the Tautznik family has tilled parts of the land for three generations.

“I used to go to Holyoke with my mother and my grandmother,” Tautznik says, recalling the days when they would load their garden produce into the back of a Ford pickup truck and haul it over the mountain into Holyoke. They’d sell their vegetables to the folks in the flats of the Paper City, weighing them on a scale they kept in back. Before they had the Ford, the family used a horse and wagon, but that was a little before Tautznik’s time.

Tautznik didn’t stumble upon the Conservation Commission by accident.

“When I was a kid, I saw a developer lay out plans with roads through this property,” he says. “That’s when I knew if you want to control land, you have to own it.”

Lest that message be lost on others, Tautznik painted “Save The Farmland” on the now demolished barn. “It was my first political act,” he says.

How do we get from politics to vodka? The raspberries, of course.

The 30-year-old bushes stand in three neat rows behind the house, where they are being thoroughly investigated by a swarm of bumblebees.

“You can see all my workers are busy,” Tautznik says.

Being mayor is a busy job, and these bushes are the last vestiges of Tautznik’s agricultural genes. He prunes them, thins them twice a season and fertilizes them with a fish emulsion to produce a late summer and early fall berry that’s as red as it wants to be. Add some potato vodka and a little sugar, put it all in some Mason jars, slap on a label designed by wife Deb and you have Mayor Mike’s Handcrafted Raspberry Vodka, a ruby-red concoction that looks as good as it tastes.

At least some people think so. Tautznik’s vodka has been known to fetch as much as $90 a quart at auction. He donates most of it to charities like Riverside Industries for use in fund-raisers, though a few are reserved for other purposes, such as maple sugaring.

Brother John has a sugar bush across the street, and when the sap starts to run, well...

“Mike comes by to help me,” John explains. “No cell phones. You just watch the sap boil.”

Although it takes some eight weeks of waiting to create Mayor Mike’s Handcrafted Raspberry Vodka, it takes about two hours for a couple of brothers to drink a Mason’s jar worth, according to John. That’s no speed record, but what’s the hurry when you’re watching sap boil?